Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.
Henry David Thoreau
American author & philosopher (1817 - 1862)

Friday, September 15, 2006

Past Due, Day 13, Tuesday- Fire Meeting

I went to fire training tonight. We all sat in a classroom and watched a video tape on taking care of sick people. It was a class on how to diagnose stupid assholes that either don’t want to wait in the emergency room, or were too busy watching television to be bothered with dragging their lazy ass to the doctor.

I do not do well with people who can not be bothered to take care of themselves, or who expect the world to respond to their every problem. Want to be 500 pounds? Fine, just expect to have health problems. Upset at mommy and daddy? Find another way to express it.

I have no problem helping those that need it. I do have a problem in other areas- I tend to say exactly what I think without filtering it. Case in point:

At my old department we had a bariatric ambulance available. It was equipped with a special gurney and a modified load system. (In English, it was an ambulance just for fat bastards. It had a queen-sized gurney and a ramp system and a wench to pull the morbidly obese into this truck.)

I got in trouble for referring to it over the radio as the “fatty caddy.” As in, “we have a big one here, cancel the ambulance and send the fatty caddy.” The 450-pound guy we were working on (who was recovering from choking on food) did not like that at all. Neither did my battalion chief

A month later, I got in trouble again for giving a person with frequent (two in one month) half-assed suicide attempts advice on how to do it properly. In my defense, it was 2 in the morning, snowing, and she was mad at daddy for not getting her a car.

So yeah, I need to work on my verbal filter. A number of people, however, need to learn rule number two.